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This pissed off people like Steve Ballmer no end, because it meant that companies like his couldn't automatically push the "new new thing" at customers. However, it also plays to their agenda to some extent because they are the entrenched thing and the entrenched thing, according to this theory, is exactly what you want.

I like what one of our users said:
"To summarize:
RFID for inventory tracking ==> Good idea
RFID for security ==> Stupid idea"

Here below I copy parts a previous comment on another story (which wasn't moderated and thus, probably not read a lot):
Anyone interested in RFID could also start with the excellent wikipedia.org entry.

Of interest, Slashdot already discussed RFID production increases before. Yes, RFID can be scary, especially in a bank or in passports. Imagine, even Sun cares for RFID. MobileMag have a small article about a 100% organic matter RFID chip developed in Korea, costing only 0.5 cents.

And if RFID and geospatial tech seriously interest you, see my sig ;-)

Yahoo has always been like this, it's just people didn't notice while google was the new hotness

Or perhaps people were pre-occupied with Yahoo!'s problem of being linked to spyware funding. People are worried about Google's response to the government subpoena for info, but seem to turn a blind eye to Yahoo! complicity. People are blasting Google for censoring Chinese search results, but the Shi Tao PR flap seems to have blown over for Yahoo!.

Or are you talking strictly in the context of free code for developers? There have been complaints that Google uses OSS but doesn't contribute enough back, yet their overal social & business ethics seem to be better than Yahoo!'s. Does Yahoo!'s code-release to the developer community somehow mitigate their other poor ethics? And how much redemption is there in a codebase that many developers have already created on their own?

Why can't banks use a similar system to the "mother's maiden name" to prove who they are? You tell them three pieces of information, and then when they call you can ask for any one of them (They may need to prompt you first).

Very good point. There's absolutely no reason to not provide a keyboard interface to re-order modules. Drag and drop makes no sense to a blind user, but re-ordering the linear content sure does. Unfortunately, sometimes it takes a lawsuit to get anything done in this country. http://news.com.com/Blind+patrons+sue+Target+for+s ite+inaccessibility/2100-1030_3-6038123.html/

The new power adapter with MagSafe connector is just that: a magnetic connection instead of a physical one. So, tripping over a power cord won't send MacBook Pro flying off a table or desk; the cord simply breaks cleanly away, without damage to either the cord or the system. As an added nicety, this means less wear on the connectors.

Intel approached Skype with its plan to optimize code on its chips for Skype's software so users would have a good experience while hosting a multiperson conference call, Crooke said. In recent years, Intel has increasingly touted its software development resources as a competitive advantage over AMD, which also trails Intel in the marketing budget category.

Other processors based on the x86 instruction set, such as AMD's chips or Via's, obviously will not come with the same optimized code found on Intel's chips. Intel and Skype announced a partnership at the Fall Intel Developer Forum last August to make sure Skype's products would run well on Intel's chips.

If this is true, I see nothing bad in the current announcement.

actually -- a company is introducing haptic touchscreens that, IIRC, use side-to-side motion to fool your fingers into thinking you're pushing into the screen.

Ernie Ball goes Linux if you havn't seen it yet. There is alot of noise about these mythical enviroments that are pro windows or pro linux, but here is a good example of a real world switch. Ernie Ball makes guitar strings, so there really isn't any internal bias about who to support beyond it being a business decision. It is also a bit of an entertaining story on how they dealt with the MS strongarming about their licenses.

Yahoo! is considering launching a program to reward people who make Yahoo! their primary search engine. Yahoo! Mail users will be given early access to this program. You will receive a monthly reward if you make Yahoo! your primary search engine. This means that most of the searching you do each month must be on Yahoo! Search. To ensure users receive credit for all searches conducted on Yahoo!, you may need to log in or use a search box specifically designed for this program (e.g., a Yahoo! rewards toolbar).

Canadian researchers are finding evidence that the high-speed, multitasking of the young and wireless can help protect their brains from aging.

Dr. Grady said the results suggest that the brains of today's youth might grow up differently.

"Young people using all of these gadgets all of the time, at the same time, it may actually make a difference when they're old, like bilingualism does," she said. "We know that practice changes the brain, as with playing an instrument, a motor task -- it makes physical changes in the brain. Maybe those kids who play video games and who are also bilingual will be the best of older adults at filtering out distractions."

Another problem is the population sample: 100 university students. This is hardly representative of the population at large. I realize this is an issue with a lot of psychological research. Psychology departments tend to use undergrads as their research subjects because they are the most available. However, in this study, I think the problem becomes even more pronounced. If you take a sample of university students, I bet you the group that plays videogames the most will have a larger proportion of students that are enrolled in computer science and engineering than the group that plays less or doesn't play any videogames at all. So what, you ask? Well, the "mental tasks" that were used to test the students are probably the type that math/compsci/engineering students will generally perform better on than sociology or history students. It may have nothing to do with videogame playing at all. Good research would take this into account.

Another problem I had with the article is that it fails to point out some of the research that has been done to indicate that videogaming actually retards brain development:

Video games: bad for your brain?

Researchers: Video games hurt brain development

This doesn't include all the research that has been done to indicate the negative effect of violent videogames. To the article's credit, though, it does mention this fact at the end.

As long as we're waving "number of cores" about as if it were the number of inches a piece of spam is promising:

http://news.com.com/Designer+puts+96+cores+on+sing le+chip/2100-1006_3-5399128.html

In short, Clearspeed's CSX600 has 96 cores, but is designed to be an accelerator board.

PS Here's the Microsoft 'Toy Story' graphics claim:

http://news.com.com/2100-1040-250632.html

haha. Thanks for the link. The Toy Story part isn't even the best bit of the article. This is:

Fries said Microsoft hasn't settled on target numbers for initial Xbox sales, but he said the European release of the console was delayed until next year mainly because the company wants to have a strong launch in the United States and Japan.

"We don't want to disappoint gamers," he said, in a not-so-veiled reference to Sony's PlayStation 2 shortages.

That's classic.

Yawn.

Another hit generating anti-hype piece.

Credibility of this 'report' is zero. Doesn't mesh with a wealth of facts we already know true about the PS3 from previous realtime demos and public Sony statements.

I'm surprised they didn't throw in a bogus 'Toy Story' graphics claim to go with the rest of the bullshit in this 'report'

PS Here's the Microsoft 'Toy Story' graphics claim:

http://news.com.com/2100-1040-250632.html

Of course they should hold copies of all my email, as well as records of all my Internet searches. How else are they supposed to help the government protect me, even when there's no evidence of wrongdoing?

"Global warming" isn't an extreme left position, blaming global warming on humans is extreme left.

Yeah, you know, extreme lefties like John McCain and evangelical Christians. I hate them pinkos.

Back in 2004, Microsoft announced that Longhorn would automatically detect a computer's graphics capability and show one of three GUIs: Aero, Aero Glass (the really high-end interface) or a classic Win2K-style interface.

This new article doesn't actually say the PCs won't be able to run Vista, but that they won't be able to take advantage of Aero Glass. It doesn't mention the three tiers of interface, but it does say this:

"When [a] user sees a system running Vista on a PC with integrated graphics, and then sees Vista on a PC with a powerful graphics [board] in it, there will be no discussion -- they will go for the better looking system if they can possibly afford it," Peddie said in a statement.

Sounds like one in two machines will be stuck with classic. Or maybe even some of those will get the mid-level GUI. But it doesn't say they won't be able to run the OS.

NTP's patents are based on work that was begun in the late 80's. While I have no love for patents, these seem valid within the context of our current patent system.

...someone has to pay the bills. If ad support isn't working then the listeners have to pay. I though this lesson was learned about 5 years ago (though judging by Vonage's IPO filing, maybe not)...

Google will delete any copies of the files from its servers within 30 days and encrypts the data, he said. Google automatically excludes from being transferred any password-protected files and secure Web pages, and users can exclude any folders or files, he added.

Here is the infamous Toy Story graphics claim about the xbox:

http://news.com.com/2100-1040-250632.html

"One of the basic premises of the Xbox is to put the power in the hands of the artist," Blackley said, which is why Xbox developers "are achieving a level of visual detail you really get in 'Toy Story.'"

There is an even worse one by Gates that I won't bother looking up.

What a bunch of pathetic losers the Dreamcast/Xbox crowd is.

This C|Net article is dated June 16 of 2005

This slashdot blurb shows a link to this on Jan 27, 2006 and links to this InformationWeek article stating a workaround.

This is just RIM wanting to quell some fears about being shut down. Execs wild eyed clutching their blackberries worring if they will be cut off is not what RIM wants.

You have said that "[Friedrich] Hayek's work...is central to my own thinking about how to manage the Wikipedia project". Or you've said things in interviews such as "Unlike some other grassroots journalism type of projects like Indymedia, which is a very far left type of thing written by activists, we strive to be a neutral, high-quality source of basic information." (which of course implies that the supposedly "very far left" Indymedia is not a good source of information, whereas Wikipedia is).

Regarding the most powerful group of your lietenants, the Arbitration Committee, last year you had an election. This year you wanted to appoint them with little input until an uproar allowed more input from the community. During this (s)election, you put in the people with the highest vote rates, except for JayJG, who had people ahead of him since so many people voted against him due to his lack of the neutrality you espouse in interviews. You say you did this because he was on ArbCom - which he is, because you appointed him to it in the past few months. This was after the election last year, where he received no votes. Instead of having another election, or going down the 2005 election list, you appoint your crony who shares your point of view. When in the election he has people ahead of him due to strong opposition over his lack of opposition, you appoint him anyway.

As a post-script to this message, which is not part of my question, I would note to the readers that Wikipedia review is a board where people discuss their unhappiness with the Wikipedia "cabal". That board has some trolls, but some of the discussions are enlightening, from experienced users. Wikipedia looks open and inviting, but experience shows that is not the case. The one good thing about Wikipedia is the licenses for Mediawiki and English Wikipedia are GPL and GFDL, so that if people become unhappy enough they can fork. I myself tend to edit on other wikis since I'm tired of the nonsense on Wikipedia. I began editing in 2003, and have watched it go downhill from then. A lot of smart experts in the field have been driven off, and the cabal, Jimbo and his lieutenants hold sway. The fact that 2005 had elections from ArbCom and 2006 had "selections" should say something about how things are headed on Wikipedia. This is a policy everyone becomes familiar with after a time.

Actually, I think Wikipedia does a decent job on articles like quantum mechanics, but it is a complete mess in articles pertaining to say relations between the Israelis and Palestinians and that type of thing. And it has just gotten worse and worse. So Wikipedia isn't all bad, just anything to do with politics or history is a mess.

But starting next year we will begin introducing Macs with Intel processors in them and over time these transitions will again occur.*snip* two years from now, our plan is that transition will be mostly complete. And we think it will be complete by the end of 2007.

Who says Apple won't switch chips again? The current relationship isn't all roses, despite all we have heard. Apple won't put those retarded "Intel inside" stickers on their products.

And, it would seem, the Intel core duo is full of serious bugs which Intel doesn't really care about.

See Antispam group rejects e-mail payment plan for more reactions.

I had to read the story twice before realizing it wasn't a hoax.

While charging for reliably sending e-mail may be a good way to fight spam, putting the onus on the sender to pay isn't that great an idea.

I run an opt-in, non-profit, ad-free announcement list, for example. I just checked and there are 521 AOL and Yahoo addresses subscribed. I'm not going to pay $5 a day to reach those people!

I don't know how AOL filters work, but ideally a user could whitelist an address. But the pay-for-bypass method seems designed around reaching users that *don't* specify they want the "priority" spam.

Just how many boxes of this checklist does this plan grossly violate?

Well thankfully here in europe we have no monopolistic companies trying to throtle torrents or have plans for to tier up the internet (yes im aware of the pun)

Here in ireland im currently on 3mbit NTL cable (soon to be upgraded to 10) with 40GB cap which is not enforced, i download over 100gb monthly

so pack ur bags and move back to the old world!

My community has enough trouble getting rid of its old tires, let alone having its own nuke in the backyard. And preferebly surround each plant with lots of guys with these the between to shred any kwaazy tewwowists who come around.

The real barrier is one of price.

Well, yes and no, last october:
MobileMag have a small article about a 100% organic matter RFID chip developed in Korea, costing only 0.5 cents. From the article: The new RFID Tag chip is able to function on the 30 kHz frequency by only using 100% organic compounds and an inkjet printer. By cutting down the price considerably it will allow for thee mass production through the printing process. The chip can also be printed on any paper, plastic and wood standard.

Of interest, Slashdot already discussed RFID production increases before.

Yes, RFID can be scary, especially in a bank or in passports. Imagine, even Sun cares for RFID.

Anyone interested in RFID could also start with the excellent wikipedia.org entry.

And if RFID and geospatial tech seriously interest you, see my sig ;-)

While, Winamp was indeed improved between versions 3 and 5, I still prefer the 2.x series and XMMS for their no-nonsense approach to music. After all, its the music we care about. The reasons for winamp's decline are many, but if you watch the developments at Winamp's Nullsoft, it gives you quite a few clues. Winamp's creator Justin Frankel is no longer affiliated with Nullsoft, and if you track the developments leading to his departure, its quite clear why winamp has suffered as well. When Nullsoft was bought by AOL in 1999, big-corporate philosophies took over and the informal nature of Nullsoft was destroyed. Coincident with this was the bloating of a once great media player. C|NET has an article about Nullsoft and Frankel's departure with some good outside references.

I doubt the Department of Homeland Security has anything like a globally distributed botnet, or permission to run DDoS like a real attacker might. The virus attack on the Russian stock market is not something goverments can replicate.

The only winners will be the companies who sell the extra bandwidth!

I doubt the Department of Homeland Security has anything like a globally distributed botnet, or permission to run DDoS like a real attacker might. The virus attack on the Russian stock market is not something goverments can replicate.

The only winners will be the companies who sell the extra bandwidth!

Now Slashdot published this article, It seens my article was rejected, so Im posting it here:

It's on the news and in other news.com, spotlighted by Google's refusal on providing search query history, that search engines may
have been collecting more than reasonable information about you, and without your permission (BTW I call my disabled cookie a explicit denial).

So I'd like to know from you, paranoic fellow: How do you protect yourself from search engines?

Besides not allowing cookies, I don't use search engines that use redirect and I block addresses already know to collect personal information as a business. But now I think it's time to step further, par to their insistence on collecting, or trying to figure, information that I explicit denied.

FYI I don't like proxies, first because a lot of them are maintened by people that instead are logging your connection, secondly because it's necessary just one bad guy using a public proxy to justice provide a warrant to log all the communication on that proxy, either from bad or good guys. And, it's not just my IP, it's also the other information that Google, for example, says to associate: date, search query, browser/OS, lang and cookies. I really want to confuse those bastards. If those SEOs morons can be sucessuful don't letting me find useful results on $valuable$ queries why we can't be in enforcing our privacy?

Since most of that information in provided by the browser I would seek for a Firefox Extension or a local hosted frontend. For further elaboration: every search would be followed by a flood of fake requests (different sources IPs) but with a fixed pattern (the query you want and a faked Browser/OS), if the information is likely to be false it has no value; every different query would be sent to a different server, Google for example have hundreds of servers world wide, bypass their nameserver and use a different server on every search, one pattern less and the problem to sync your searches on their side; improve bookmark/history search, to avoid searching again what you already did; other suggestions? And more important: the solutions?

What mind blowing hypocrisy

Q: What about links people click on from search engine results? Can that information be turned over too?
Yes. Through a process known as redirection, Yahoo and AOL record what links people click. Unless the companies discard these records, they would be fair game for a subpoena.

The link they give is
hxxp://dw.com.com/redir?destUrl=hxxp://www.macales ter.edu/its/docs/howto/urlredirect/&siteId=22&oId= 2100-9588-6034666-2&ontId=9588&lop=nl.ex

This may seem like a silly question, but how can you test for something that won't be there?

Are they just trying to restrict false positives? Or just show off that they have something? This is just going to be another ineffective technology that too much money was spent on.

One more reason to get Gmail. AOL should change their name to AHOLE. If they do email like they do their accounting you can watch this go down the toilet. After losing 99 BILLION dollars and staying in business, you can bet they want to charge for even looking at their logo. This 99 BILLION dollars was all barely reported in the media as well... http://news.com.com/AOL+loses+Ted+Turner+and+99+bi llion/2100-1023_3-982648.html/ But of course who is the owner of CNN, but AHOLE/Time Warner.

Link for that is here: http://news.com.com/2100-1027_3-5161209.html

So who's next for a share price tumble? Those Oracle shares are looking a bit pricey in light of recent free DB2 from IBM?

So who's next for a share price tumble? Those Oracle shares are looking a bit pricey in light of recent free DB2 from IBM?

Perhaps that's why Google is interested in buying dark fiber.

Verizon's FIOS is a private network just like the cable companies COAX. There are four fiber lines in the cable. 1 for video, 1 for voice, 1 for internet and 1 for future use. Unless the author means Verizon is hogging the public internet bandwidth (backbone), then this article is completely false. Even then, I believe Verizon is streaming the content from thier own equipment on the FIOS network, not the public BBN.

Article on FIOS here - http://news.com.com/Verizons+fiber+race+is+on/2100 -1034_3-5275171.html.

Enjoy.

Google uses scads of servers, and it's getting so that the energy costs over their lifetimes will outweigh their acquisition costs. Take your pick of Peak {Oil, Uranium, Coal, Gas} scenarios, but Google may just run out of gas if it costs more to run those giga-server farms than they can haul in from AdWords revenue.

Well, I was attempting to be funny and evidently failing. I actually am familiar with Sarbanes-Oxley, which focuses on retention of data (e.g. e-mail and business records). I don't think it applies to adding hardware to servers.

I work for a large healthcare organization, dealing with HIPPA regulations and the like. That doesn't seem to stop our network team from tossing in new hardware left and right. Shucks, we had a brief downtime for one of our servers and within a couple weeks they were ordering hardware to set up a cluster. It sounds more like a staffing and culture issue than anything else.

A CNET reporter has an interesting article on the IE7 beta. http://news.com.com/2061-10805_3-6033611.html

Noting that M$ really means beta .

Admittedly, this would be easier to take for most users if it didn't kill IE6. Bearing in mind also that the publicity this release has will likely mean that many inexperienced users will download and click through the install buttons blindly.

I'm thinking that M$ should really come up with new terminology for their releases. Any first final release of a M$ product in the past few years has been little much more than a final RC than the actual final product. Being the reason why the large enterprise company that I last worked for didn't install SP2 until the last minute after really really thorough internal testing.

While I have some sympathy for most companies releasing new software, as it is hard to predict what will break when you can't predict what users will do with it, or want to do with it - and there's always conflict with some guy who wants to run Word Perfect for DOS from the hard drive he built from a Pringles can, a cd of Dark Side of the Moon and parts salvaged from an old dot matrix printer.

But... my feeling is a company the size of M$ should be able to release software in a manner that is either safe or with the risks more prudently stated.

For example, forget alpha, beta etc:

Release 1. Good Luck and may your god help you...
Release 2. Keep a fire extinguisher nearby at all times, only use in a well ventilated room.
Release 3. May cause seizures or induce vomiting
Release 4. Still a bit iffy
Release 5. Fingers Crossed.
Release 6. (after about a year of general release) Um, yep, seems to work...


I guess the only reason they don't is because the marketing dept won't allow it.

Anyway, I'm sticking with Firefox. I'll only be upgrading to IE7 when there is absolutely no choice.

Can I call BS on that? Rhetoric, all of it and I quote from your above post on the MS IE Blog, "I wanted to make it clear that we know Beta 1 makes little progress for web developers in improving our standards support, particularly in our CSS implementation. I feel badly about this, but we have been focused on how to get the most done overall for IE7, so due to our lead time for locking down beta releases and ramping up our team, we could not get a whole lot done in the platform in beta 1. However, I know this will be better in Beta 2 "

I would like to point out that the above post is dated July 29th, 2005.

Half of the problems with IE's implementation of CSS (from a designers POV) is that they insist on sticking us with defaults other than 0, none, or off. As far as they're concerned they're not bugs - they're features.

The comments you pointed out only highlight MS's opinion that the situation with CSS has very low priority. A very low priority indeed.

According to eWeek.com, "Sources claiming familiarity with Microsoft's IE 7.0 plans said the company will add some additional CSS2 support to its new standalone browser. But Microsoft isn't planning to go the whole way and make IE 7.0 fully CSS2 compliant, sources said."

Of course, one site, 465BeraStreet.com can even wag a finger @ MS for fixing bugs at all, "When Internet Explorer 7 is released, probably later this year, it looks like one long-standing CSS selector bug in IE will be fixed: the Star html Selector Bug, also known as the Tan hack. Since the bug has been used by many web developers to target specific CSS rules at Internet Explorer as a way of working around various CSS bugs in the browser, some are worried that Microsoft fixing the bug in IE 7 may cause developers a lot of extra work."

And to highlight my point that M$ just doesn't care at all about CSS standards or compliancy thereof, CNet quotes Greg Sullivan, of the Windows client group as saying, "While it is true that our implementation is not fully, 100 percent W3C-compliant, our development investments are driven by our customer requirements and not necessarily by standards"

If they can't get around to it until after Alpha/Beta releases to fix issues they've known about for years now and because they themselves say that it isn't a priority to even try to meet the standards, No, I don't expect M$ to give any priority to the problems with CSS where I.E. 7.0 is concerned.

The worst, however, as highlighted above, Microsoft's utter lack of response to the issues in the past has now lead to a situation where any action to do anything positive would swamp designers with so much back-peddling to remove all their I.E. 5.5 hacks that new hacks would have to be implemented to cover up old hacks that are covering up old hacks... all because they didn't do anything earlier and still refuse to do anything about it now.

No my friends, CSS and IE will not be reconcicled - not now, not ever. They missed the boat.

IMHO.

And apparently he's spends a lot of free time pissing gamers off:

Starforce Posts Thier Objections to Toms Hardware

This may seem familiar (from C|Net): StarForce Response

Can you say whacko? Ooooopppss! I may be attracting a lawsuit or at least a visit from the FBI...

Nearly every car company fell into line to pay royalties to the Association for the privilege of making and selling cars.

Except Henry Ford. The association did not want another competitor in Detroit and it did not like his idea of driving prices down to where average people could afford a car. So it refused to license him. For Ford, it was either exit the industry or fight the Selden Patent in court. He decided to raise a legal war chest and fight the incumbents. The litigation lasted from 1903 until 1911 and along the way, the association launched hundreds of lawsuits against Ford's customers to scare them away from his showrooms for buying "unlicensed vehicles."

The end users are still indemnified. They're not getting sued. Microsoft never said THEY were indemnified. There's an article here that covers some recent changes to the indemnity clause that business licensees get. I dunno if that extends to people with individual licenses, though.

with MSN network, we (large corp) banned all of their MSN domains as this is a security risk and as its intentionally deceptive on their part we had to classify it as malicious due to the intent

here (with analysis)
news report here

of course MS still use it and the surfers still have no idea its occuring, though if you block their servers you soon find out how many times they try.

never mind trusting the user, its the server and the company that does it that people cant trust

about 4 months ago...